The guard of the tomb of the king's great grandfather stood with two swords under the moon of gold. With one sword he very carefully slit the base of his large belly and inserted the other and fell upon it and sprawled beside the king's footstool. His blood sprinkled the tulips and the poets in a row.

 (The gongs are quiet in the temples. Men with hairy arms scattering with taut bows through the city; there is blood on new spearshafts.)

 The long gold nails of the king's right hand were held together at the tips in an attitude of discernment. The geometrical glitter of snowflakes, the pointed breasts of yellow girls crimson with henna, the swirl of river-eddies about a barge where men sit drinking, the eternal dragon of magnificence.... Beyond the tulip bed stood the poets in a row.

 The garden full of spearshafts and shouting and the whine of arrows and the red bows of Tartars and trampling of the sharp hoofs of war-horses. Under the golden moon the men with hairy arms struck off the heads of the tulips in the tulip-bed and of the poets in a row.

 The king lifted the hand that held the flaming dragon-flower. 

 Him of the snowflakes, he said. On a new white spearshaft the men with hairy arms spitted the king and the black slave who scratched his back with a back-scratcher of emerald.

There was a king in China.

IV

 Says the man from Weehawken to the man from Sioux City as they jolt cheek by jowl on the bus up Broadway:       —That's her name, Olive Thomas, on the red skysign, died of coke or somethin'       way over there in Paris. Too much money. Awful immoral the lives them film stars lead.

 The eye of the man from Sioux City glints in the eye of the man from Weehawken. Awful ... lives out of sky-signs and lust; curtains of pink silk fluffy troubling the skin rooms all prinkly with chandeliers, bed cream-color with pink silk tassles creased by the slender press of thighs. Her eyebrows are black her lips rubbed scarlet breasts firm as peaches gold curls gold against her cheeks. She dead all of her dead way over there in Paris.

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